Neoliberalization of English Language Policy in the Global South
Neoliberalization of English Language Policy in the Global South
P. Boruah (*)
Department of English Language Teaching, Gauhtai University, Guwahati, Assam, India
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Mohanty
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli, India
Introduction
This chapter provides a critical discussion of the overt and unconscious ways in
which English medium education (EME) in India promotes and sustains the neo-
liberal regime and provides continual resistance to the implementation of a
healthy multilingual education policy. In India, English has lodged itself into an
uncontested space created by fissures within both national language-in-education
policy (LiEP) and the lack of robust curricular models built around the multilin-
gual habitus. Some such gaps that English has been able to fill emerged out of the
lack of national consensus on an 'official' language or a lingua franca to negotiate
life beyond community and state, the unclear and problematic definitions of
'mother tongue' in LiEP documents and the complete reliance on the teacher to
interpret, manage and direct successful learning of English. Given an education
culture that considers economic success as directly proportional to mastery over
English, schools with English as medium of instruction thrive, and an English
medium education is considered a way out of poverty, exclusion and class
subjugation.
Neoliberalism in Indian education is premised on the benefits of wealth creation
through a free market, where education is considered “an engine for economic
growth” (Block et al, 2012b, p. 7), and where the production of human capital is
intricately tied to individuals’ mastery over English. A common perception in India
(Dey, 2019; Karat, 1972; Malik, 2012; Roy, 1993; Shepherd, 2019) is that the ineq-
uities perpetuated by neoliberalism are a construction of the elite classes who act as
gatekeepers for English. However, it is the economically stable middle class that
keeps the neoliberal rhetoric alive by investing in EME for their children. As Chacko
(2020) argues,
the rapid expansion of relatively low-fee English-medium private schools across the coun-
try is viewed as evidence of ‘the widespread ideology of English-medium education’s trans-
formative potential’, not only among those who consider themselves middle class, but also
among those who aspire to the middle class. (p. 6)
Several scholars investigating social disadvantage, mobility and the private English
medium education industry (Chacko, 2020; Das, 2016; EPW Engage, 2021; James
& Woodhead, 2014; Jayadeva, 2019; Mathew & Lukose, 2020; Mohanty, 2017,
2019 and others) discuss the wide variation in class boundaries, with new groups
self-identifying as ‘middle-class’ to gain access to better English education. As
Jayadeva (2019) discusses,
the proliferation of low-cost English-medium schools has contributed to very real socio-
economic mobility among the expanding Indian middle classes, and those who aspire to
join their ranks, while simultaneously also creating new types of inequality, based on
English proficiency. (p. 154)
The lower classes thus join the middle classes in providing the clientele for the
low-cost EME market. The economic elite feels no threat from these groups’
4 English Medium Education in India: The Neoliberal Legacy and Challenges… 53
Ever since the 1990s, when India opened up its economic, educational and cultural
doors to compete in the global market, the neoliberal agenda began to be main-
streamed at both the macro/institutional and micro/individual levels. India, like
Malaysia, “embarked on neoliberalist policies by adopting a national industrialisa-
tion strategy aiming for exports to the world market, welcoming foreign companies’
contributions to its economy” (Daghigh & Rahim, 2020, p. 3). The negotiation of
participation in a global market, with its associated focus on entrepreneurial skills,
also necessitated a common language through which to access “economic advance-
ment, elevated status and prestige and trans-national mobility” (Singh et al., 2002,
pp. 53–54), even though this came with a baggage of exclusionary outcomes (Young,
2011). It is no surprise that “[i]n neoliberal discourse, English is learned as a detach-
able, marketable and saleable resource or commodity that can convert into various
forms of capital (cf. Bourdieu, 2008) in exchange for economic achievement and
social mobility” (Shi & Lin, 2016, p. 170).
A critical reading of the neoliberal agenda in India’s education policies and prac-
tices (Chudgar & Creed, 2016; Harma, 2009; Heller, 2010; James & Woodhead,
2014; Jones, 2018; Mousumi & Kusakabe, 2019; Nambissan, 2012a, b; Srivastava
et al., 2013; Mehrotra & Panchamukhi, 2006; Tooley & Dixon, 2006) shows that
neoliberalism has entrenched itself so firmly in the Indian mindscape that the role,
quality and practices of schooling are discussed and critiqued through a measurable,
market-driven rhetoric. In other words, the neoliberal jargon (in English) has turned
into the standardized linguistic form through which the development agenda is con-
sumed or critiqued. Bourdieu (1991) explains the value of utterances and their rela-
tion to power, which, he says, “depends on the capacity of the various agents
involved in the exchange to impose the criteria of appreciation most favourable to
their own products” (p. 503). The dialectic has thus shifted from the acceptance of
language as a marker of culture, breeding, in-group solidarity to the reframing of
language as a commodity with economic value.
Foregrounding of the instrumental functions of language instead of its integra-
tive functions has thus brought English to prominence in India (Mohanty, 2019).
The value of utterances in the social structure is English; it is the marker of social
class, educational achievement, economic success, power and privilege. There is a
tacit understanding, at least among the middle and lower classes, that English is the
language used to manage communication between the various global market play-
ers (producers, consumers, regulatory bodies), work processes, computerization,
4 English Medium Education in India: The Neoliberal Legacy and Challenges… 55
the service sector and other forms of physical, symbolic or linguistic resources
(Heller, 2010).
It comes as no surprise then that an English education is considered the legiti-
mate, time-tested and respectable route to a better (and prosperous) life. Even with
awareness of the imperfect conditions awaiting their children when they begin
school, parents from all economic strata make education choices that are skewed
heavily towards English medium schools. Pennycook (2000) views this “global
dominance of English…as a product of the local hegemonies of English” (p. 117).
Kandiah (2001) sees a less conscious participation of parents in this enterprise and
more of an unavoidable trapping in a larger neoliberal scheme, warning of the
“apparently unavoidable risk of co-option, of acquiescing in the negation of their
own understandings of reality and in the accompanying denial or even subversion of
their own interests” (p. 112). Other critics of the global presence of English in the
postcolonial regime also write about the peculiar conceptualization and legitimiza-
tion of the role of English in education. Lin and Martin (2005), for example recon-
struct the notion of ‘Empire’ as “both invisible and non-monolithic”, reminding us
that “we can no longer use the old binary logic” of Empire vs Us, that is, viewing
empowerment through English as a kind of resistance to imperialism (p. 4). It is the
belief, that an English education is the route to crossing class and caste boundaries
historically regulated by society, overcoming poverty and its related social, eco-
nomic and cultural stigmas, carving inroads to state and community resources, that
have resulted in a thriving English medium education.
government mandate, but in practice, although these schools use textbooks written
in the two languages, classroom instruction is mostly in Hindi.
In essence, people choose an English medium school if they want their children
to receive an early and more intensive education in English. Besides autonomy in
textbook selection, teacher recruitment and other factors, EME schools are also
outside the purview of the National Council of Educational Research and Training
(NCERT) and its state counterparts (the SCERTs), which are the government bodies
that manage education. The NCERT is responsible for producing pedagogical
guidelines for the country through the National Curricular Framework (NCF), the
Position Papers for the teaching of all subjects, including languages, and other cur-
ricular regulations. However, adhering to NCERT/SCERT guidelines is not a man-
datory requirement for private (English medium) schools because such schools do
not come under the purview of the government school inspectorate. Nor are these
schools required to use the textbooks produced by the NCERT or the SCERTs until
Grade IX, at which level these schools seek affiliation to secondary certification
boards. Because these schools are not part of the government education policy exe-
cution network, government research funding and focus are also not channelled
towards them; the reformation and research efforts of the national education mis-
sion (Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan or SSA) are directed only at government schools
and school teachers.
Apart from issues of defining mother tongues and the attempt to include these in
language education frameworks, there was a drive to retain English as the language
for international communication as in administration. The National Education
Policy (NEP) (1968) decided that English should be one of the three compulsory
languages in the three language formula (TLF), the other two being Hindi and a
modern Indian language (preferably one of the languages of Southern India) in the
Hindi speaking states, and Hindi and the regional language in the non-Hindi speak-
ing states. However, South Indian states like Tamil Nadu resisted what they saw as
the imposition of Hindi, and Northern states that had Hindi as the dominant lan-
guage did not find any economic incentive in learning any of the South Indian
languages.
In addition, the delineation of languages into vertical categories – as first, second
and third languages – within the provisions of the TLF, turned the formula into a
symbolic rather than a practicable solution in context (see Panda & Mohanty, 2014
for a detailed analysis of India’s language-in-education policies). Implementation of
the TLF was left to state agencies, which perpetuated hierarchies in curricular fram-
ing. Because states were free to decide on the medium of instruction at school
(mother tongue or regional language as the ‘first’ language), and because each state
had a number of languages spoken as mother tongues, the state language (i.e. the
58 P. Boruah and A. Mohanty
language spoken by the majority in the state) became the chosen medium of instruc-
tion/language of schooling. Mohanty (2019), Mohanty & Panda (2016), Panda &
Mohanty (2014) have analysed the LiEP and the TLF in India and have argued that
the failure to differentiate mother tongues (MTs) from regional and dominant lan-
guages resulted in exclusion of ITM languages from education. While states strug-
gled to accommodate various languages in the curriculum as media of instruction or
additional (second/third/fourth) languages, there was no debate about English,
which became a compulsory subject at school, and the main language of higher
education. In the revised NPE of 1986, the inclusion of English as a compulsory
subject was justified as a means of keeping up with “world knowledge… especially
in science and technology” (NPE, 1986, p. 40). But the national government also
warned against a “perceived hegemony of English” (NCERT, 2006, p. 4) and posed
two challenges for language education: “(a) in regional medium schools, how can
children’s other languages strengthen English learning? (b) in English medium
schools, how can other Indian languages be valorised, reducing the perceived hege-
mony of English?”
Over the decades, English remained at the heart of every new LiEP, its necessity
within the Indian fabric reiterated through impassioned arguments and reasoning.
The National Curriculum Framework (2005) called for introduction of English at
the elementary level as “a matter of political response to people’s aspiration” (NCF,
2005, p. 38). English was recognized as necessary to prepare Indians for the global
knowledge explosion. [National Knowledge Commission (NKC), 2007]. English
also came to be interpreted as a tool for inclusion. In that decade, the ‘hegemony’ of
English was recognized, but policy was accommodative, considering English neces-
sary for a transformative society. “[T]he time has come for us to teach our people,
ordinary people, English as a language in schools. Early action in this sphere would
help us build an inclusive society and transform India into a knowledge society”
(NKC, 2007).
In 2019, however, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led national government
questioned the hegemony of English and saw the proliferation of English-medium
schools not as a response to aspirations of opportunity and success, but as a threat
to an Indian sensibility. “Despite the rich, expressive and scientific nature of Indian
languages, there has been an unfortunate trend in schools and society towards
English as a medium of instruction and as a medium of conversation” (Draft NEP,
2019, p. 81). When the new National Education Policy came out in June 2020, the
volatile issue of English and an English medium instruction through privatization
was again left unaddressed, even though the hostile rhetoric against English was
omitted. The word “English” occurs only five times in the 71-page document, and
references to it are made obliquely through the word “bilingual” (p. 16), effectively
4 English Medium Education in India: The Neoliberal Legacy and Challenges… 59
absolving the document of any responsibility of defining the status and role of
English and EME in twenty-first century India.
Under the wide and unclear provisions for languages in education in the NEP
2020, it is likely that states will continue to struggle over language-of-choice hier-
archies in deciding the “two of the three languages”, allowing English to further
consolidate its position as the language of official purposes as well as the language
of power. Within the blurred boundaries of framing English in language policy,
administration or public perception as an Indian language, a colonial tool, or as a
hegemonic strategy to alienate lower classes from equitable participation in eco-
nomic nation building, attitudes to English medium instruction as a route to moder-
nity and success have neither faded nor altered, perpetuating the neoliberal
mechanism and all its attendant problems. Mohanty et al. (2009) warns: “When
language becomes the basis of power, control and discrimination, socioeconomic
inequality is perpetuated; the language(s) that people speak or do not speak deter-
mines their access to resources” (p. 121). Annamalai (2005) argues on similar lines,
reminding us that unless the linguistic dichotomy (that English is for progress and
modernity while Indian languages are for cultural preservation) is countered reso-
lutely by education, “nation-building will remain notional” (p. 36).
Creed, 2016, p. 546). In short, the choice of a private English medium education
cuts across social and economic class, with education providers offering a range of
school types, along with the choice of opting for schools affiliated to CBSE, ICSE
or state education boards. While legislation is quiet on the implications of this
choice on the market, “[s]chool choice is presented as providing innovation, respon-
siveness, accountability, efficiency and above all, improvement through competi-
tion” (Härmä, 2009, p. 153). In spite of the differential access to a ‘good’ English
medium education, the perception of free choice in the matter of quality education
means that “the private sector continues to grow by default more than by govern-
ment design” (Mehrotra & Panchamukhi, 2006, p. 438). Fed by dreams of a better
quality of life, and a way out of poverty, exclusion and caste-based discrimination,
economically marginalized groups such as the Dalits (the lowest class in the caste
circuit) view English as a divine redeemer, not as a part of any grand economic
design concocted to widen the fault lines of society:
English is the milk of a lioness ... only those who drink it will roar. ... With the
blessings of Goddess English, Dalit children will not grow to serve landlords or skin
dead animals or clean drains or raise pigs and buffaloes. They will grow into adju-
dicators and become employers and benefactors. Then the roar of the Dalits ... will
be heard by one and all. (Pandey, 2011, 15 February)
The neoliberal discourse thus gets extended to the matter of choice of schooling,
with the possibility of entry to an English medium school considered the all-
important step towards economic and social emancipation. Baird (2009) reports
from a study on low cost schooling that “the vast majority of low income parents I
interviewed believed that if their child can speak English, he or she would be guar-
anteed a middle-class job” (p. 21). Reports of schooling choice from several states
(Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, among others) show that
private English medium schools catering especially to a low-income clientele are
springing up “practically in every locality of the urban centres as well as in rural
areas” (Aggarwal, 2000, p. 20).1
The choice of a private English medium education thus depends on the hope of a
promising future, usually premised on success stories of past high school graduates
rather than on the quality of education. Choice also has to do with the ‘saviour
effect’ – as mentioned earlier in the chapter, through the marketing of English as a
wise investment with many future dividends through a wide range of cultural sym-
bols (e.g. advertisements of luxury products, holiday packages, happy-family
homes, corporate professionals, social media activity and so on); the middle class
1
For more details, see De et al., 2002; Jones, 2018; Nambissan, 2003, 2012a, b; Tooley &
Dixon, 2006.
4 English Medium Education in India: The Neoliberal Legacy and Challenges… 61
being the biggest consumers and perpetrators of this package. The middle class
becomes the conduits through which EME is unequivocally promoted, and whose
promotion of EME makes English an achievable goal. The relatively high dispos-
able wealth of the middle class also makes them “educational consumers and inves-
tors, picking and choosing from the hierarchy of schools on offer, from the least
attractive government school to the highest status private school, ‘upgrading’ their
child’s school when resources permit, and downgrading when circumstances
change” (James & Woodhouse, 2014, p. 85).
Mehrotra and Panchamukhi (2006) discuss the various fee structures of the pri-
vate unaided English medium school industry, and the clientele that patronizes the
schools on offer. The following tables from Mohanty (2017, p. 270) illustrate the
differences in schooling costs across private and public (popularly referred to as
‘government’) schools in India (Fig. 4.1).
The hierarchy of school education choices and its implications on aspirations of
achieving a “good English medium education” is captured in the figure from
Mohanty (2017, p. 270) (Fig. 4.2).
For the social classes that cannot afford “good quality EM private schools” there
is the perception that high fees are an additional barrier preventing access to English
language skills development, and consequently, good quality general education.
The absence of a regulatory mechanism to govern the quality of education
imparted in English medium schools, especially the low-cost sector, has not only
allowed a proliferation of financially and educationally unaccountable schools, it
has also allowed a parallel “shadow institutional framework” (Srivastava, 2008,
p. 452) to thrive comfortably within the neoliberal paradigm. Srivastava defines this
‘framework’ as a “codified yet informal set of norms and procedures” operating to
“manipulate and mediate the formal policy and regulatory framework for their
Fig. 4.2 The Relationship between schooling and social class in India
benefit” (ibid). In this framework the value of education is mapped to cost, such that
a ‘good quality’ English medium school is usually understood as one that charges a
high fee (with hidden costs such as textbooks from private publishers, transport fee,
events donations, school trips or international assessment certificates). Public per-
ception is fed on the view that the higher the amount charged, the better would be
the quality of textbooks, teachers, facilities and opportunities. A study by Nambissan
and Ball (2011) found that among the educational services in most demand by par-
ents, private coaching and computer classes topped the list. “Computer classes were
flagged as the ‘new English’ …meaning that these services were most in demand by
a parent” (Nambissan, 2012a, b, p. 88). It is common to see parents changing their
children’s schools as the salaries increase, from lower cost to higher charging
schools that promise high-demand educational services, in the belief that this would
give their children a head start on a college education and a high paying job. Many
parents also see education in an English medium school as a response to their own
(lack of) education, and as opening up possibilities of social mobility, acceptance,
and a way out of poverty.
The culture of sacrifice for the good of offspring, the need to have more visibility
in society through more spending power –it is these broader considerations that fuel
and keep the private English medium education market thriving. The colonial hang-
over of obedience to authority, etiquette and discipline, coupled with parents’ belief
that they are incapable of contributing to their children’s education, are all part of
the image of a ‘good’ English medium education, and serves the market well.
Parents from low income and disadvantaged groups are most susceptible to the
imagery of success peddled by English medium schools to advertise their educa-
tion packages, especially since their limited education proves a barrier to under-
standing of rules and regulations governing education. Some such legislations
4 English Medium Education in India: The Neoliberal Legacy and Challenges… 63
include 25% reservation of seats that all private schools are mandated to offer2 for
low income aspirants, and the provisions of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009.
(See Chudgar & Creed, 2016; Mehendale, Mukhopadhyay, & Namala, 2015 for
more discussion).
The character and structure of EM schools has shown (see Copley, 2018; Gray,
2012; Gray & Block, 2012, 2014; Kubota, 2016; Phillipson, 2008, 2009; Xiong &
Yuan, 2018) how they contribute to and create image (or illusion) of global success
through English, perpetuating a neoliberal agenda originating out of the Anglo-
American world. The promotion of English communication skills as a highly desir-
able commodity for economic success has meant that private English medium
schools use curricula and material developed within a Western communicative para-
digm even when such pedagogical choices do not resonate with the cultural experi-
ences of the students. Imported teaching strategies built into commercial textbooks
in English are part of the larger economic enterprise, and sit uncomfortably in the
hands of teachers and students raised within a very different educational ecosystem.
The production and supply of textbooks selling a ‘communicative’ methodology to
EM schools by international ELT materials production houses legitimize teaching
resources that implicitly or covertly promote neoliberal values such as individual
enterprise, competition, monopoly and profit at the cost of accountability, invest-
ment in cultural capital and equity. But textbooks that “are saturated with neoliberal
values … clash with the schema of learners in non-western contexts” (Daghigh &
Rahim, 2020, p. 3), as a result of which the sanctioned pedagogy is never the peda-
gogy of practice. The much celebrated communicative pedagogies promoted in the
accompanying textbooks clash with traditional value systems that are rooted in col-
lectivism and manifested through “values such as obedience, respect and non-
confrontation towards people in authority and older people within and outside the
family domain (e.g., parents, older family members, elders in the community)”
(Daghigh & Rahim, 2020, p. 3). More importantly, the use of such pedagogies con-
tradicts national language policy directives such as promotion of mother tongues,
valuing the multilingual character of India, or employing one’s familiar languages
to learn English, or in English.
Most of the literature on education practices in low cost private EM schools
(cited in previous sections) attest to the inability of (poorly paid) teachers to
2
This is among the few regulations that private (English medium) schools aspiring for affiliation to
school boards are expected to follow; but because of the lack of accountability, many schools are
able to evade this directive. In fact, the popular Bollywood movie Hindi Medium (2017) captures
the nuances of the social implications of this reservation policy for parents aspiring to educate their
children in an English medium school.
64 P. Boruah and A. Mohanty
translate the curriculum into effective learning opportunities. This gap between
what is promised and what is delivered is camouflaged under the neoliberal slogan
of ‘study hard, prepare to compete if you want success’, effectively transferring
responsibility of learning from the education service provider to the consumer. In
some EM school contexts, teachers tolerate no language but English while in others,
most English teaching happens in languages other than English (Boruah, 2017).
Historically marginalized classes (such as the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes
or Dalits), forced to negotiate the unfamiliar linguistic and pedagogical practices of
the private schools in which they enrol their children, become a casualty in the invis-
ible tug of war between economic benefit and identity preservation.
Some scholars tend to view the aspirational behaviour of the lower social classes
not as detrimental to their linguistic identity and development, but as a desirable, or
even admirable trait. Vaish (2008), for example, claims that “there is an inherent
ecological balance that does not endanger the biodiversity of languages in India
with the threat of language loss and shift” (p. 24). Other scholars such as Mohanty
(2019), Mohanty and Panda (2016), Skutnabb-Kangas et al., (2009), however, see
the neoliberal agenda in education as a serious threat to India’s linguistic character
as well as its inherent multilingualism. Mohanty and Panda (2016), for example,
argue that “some languages are associated with greater power and privileges com-
pared to many others, which suffer neglect and discrimination in significant domains
of use such as governance, law, education, trade, and commerce” (p. 3). They refer
particularly to the “widespread attempt to bring English very early into the primary
education in the Indian subcontinent” and “[t]he linguistic dichotomy perpetuated
by ambiguous policy and lack of accountability of the private education sector
[which] has come at significant cost to Indian multilingualism and multicultural-
ism” (p. 10).
With the current dispensations in the new NEP about honouring students’ home
languages, national education planning agencies such as the NCERT would have to
redesign curricula to reflect “current conversations about the use of pluralingual
forms of communication in education, whether labelled translanguaging, translit-
eracy, plural language practices, or polylingual languaging” (Groff, 2016, p. 156).
The notion that a multilingual speaker’s languages are independent linguistic sys-
tems that develop in the order in which the individual gets ‘exposure’ to them is a
tokenism that needs to be debunked. While rebuilding Indian language education
from a normative multilingual position, pedagogy has to focus on children’s
‘medium of thinking’ (which could be in all the languages that a child is exposed to
in its environment, and not just the home language) rather than on ‘teachers’ medium
of instruction’ (Mohanty, 2020, public lecture), such that the learning of English
4 English Medium Education in India: The Neoliberal Legacy and Challenges… 65
occurs within the general agenda of language education through “more experiential,
holistic, integrated, inquiry-driven, discovery-oriented, learner-centred, discussion-
based, flexible, and, of course, enjoyable” (NEP, 2020, p. 3) processes.
Curricular provisions will also need to critique English studies in higher learning
institutions that have remained “a central signifier for social difference, although the
difference shifted from race and gender to class, caste and ethnicity with the con-
tinuation of gender disparities” (Dutt, 2019, p. viii). In a future framing of language
education, marginalization of educational opportunities for socially disadvantaged
students will have to be countered not only at school sites, but also “by restructuring
syllabi and effecting a pedagogic overhaul in colleges and universities, in promoting
visible creativity and encouraging non-hierarchic, transdisciplinary dialogues that
teach critical thinking and stimulate the imagination” (Dutt, 2019, p. ix). As the
New London Group (NLG) declared in 1996, “The role of pedagogy is to develop
epistemology of pluralism that provides access without people having to erase or
leave behind different subjectivities” (NLG, 1996, p. 72).
In other words, to counter the erosion of educational values that are not bound
within a for-profit commercial model, the English medium school industry will
have to promote “a pedagogy of multiliteracies…one in which language and other
modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade
by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes” (NLG, 1996,
p. 64). If we see multilingualism as the norm rather than as an exception, it becomes
clear that every human being has the ability to potentially learn more than one lan-
guage; monolinguals, then, are the exception: they are language users of one lan-
guage because they have not been ‘exposed’ to (or have been deprived of) other
languages. It is this ideological construction of the potential of human beings to
acquire languages that needs to form the basis of second/foreign/other language/
dialect acquisition, and English medium education will need to be envisaged within
such a framework rather than as a workshop for training humans to work as com-
munication brokers.
As the table above shows, the popular notion that in post-colonial multilingual soci-
eties, English has become a ‘native’ language and a part of the multilingual ecology,
does not hold much ground. According to Phillipson (2009), the claim that the
English language truly belongs to its users wherever they are and is detached from
its Anglo-American roots is, “a fraudulent claim that is as untrue in York as
New York or New Delhi” (p. 90). Mohanty (2019) agrees: “English as a language is
quite alien to Indian life and culture, especially rural and tribal India” (p. 193)
Mohanty (2017, 2019) discusses a number of studies which expose the myth of
EM superiority and show that when quality of schooling and socio-economic
66 P. Boruah and A. Mohanty
differences are controlled, MT medium schools are more effective. The association
between EM schooling and social privileges and the dual system of private and
public schools bringing in a hierarchy related to the cost of schooling, make educa-
tion a social instrument to perpetuate social inequalities and a form of casteism
reflecting the consequences of different types of EM education. Despite its distance
from the masses and their languages and its demographically minority status3, the
dominance of English in India thus goes well beyond its control over material
resources and the processes of globalisation and market forces (including British or
American promotion of English and Anglicization) in the neoliberal regime. The
dominance is reified through complex dynamics of multiple cultural layers in the
diverse Indian society and gets entrenched in language users’ system of beliefs and
values transmitted across generations through the processes of multilingual sociali-
sation (Mohanty, 2019, Mohanty & Skutnabb-Kangas, in press).
Any policy of language education that privileges English over other languages pro-
motes development for some and deprives many. Based on strong evidence, a num-
ber of researchers around the world have recommended relocating English into the
MT-based multilingual education (MLE) framework suitable for multilingual soci-
eties like India (see Skutnabb-Kangas & Mohanty, 2009; Mohanty et al., 2009).
Debunking the widely prevalent belief that EM schools are better than mother
tongue or regional language medium schools, the MLE framework seeks to develop
English on a strong foundation of MT and indigenous languages. Without a sus-
tained curriculum implementation that works out of an ecological framing of lan-
guage education, values and incorporates children’s lived multilingual experiences
and cognitive strategies for straddling various language repertoires, the English lan-
guage will remain an exclusive tool in the hands of a few, rather than a marker of
economic and social equity for all. The “linguistic dichotomy” that Annamalai
(2005, p. 36) had warned of has to be resisted through a multiliteracy, multilingual
framework that is not structured around vague rank ordering of languages as first,
second or third. Positioning English officially as a second language in pedagogy has
not worked in situations (such as rural or remote Indian districts) where English has
no contextual presence, or works at best as a foreign language. In English- medium
schools, conversely, the pedagogical orientation which mimics English as a first
language has not worked either.
The English language has also to be reclaimed from class-based sites tradition-
ally held as private and exclusive; a truly multilingual approach to literacy has to
3
Less than 0.02% of the Indian population claim English as their MT and approximately 10%
know English through formal education (Mohanty, 2019).
4 English Medium Education in India: The Neoliberal Legacy and Challenges… 67
help learners negotiate the exclusionary ‘between’ spaces where English gets boxed
due to undemocratized language planning. The languages in the everyday lives of
students and teachers both inside and outside of the classrooms do not exist in neat,
discrete categories but are used in fluid, creative, intertwined ways. It would not do,
for instance, to classify learners as learning-disabled simply because their commu-
nication skills regress in an English-poor social space. When it comes to education
of the masses in post-colonial societies, the question is thus not of choosing between
English and MT or between English and national languages. It is not either English
or any other language; it is both: English and multilingualism.
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Padmini Boruah, PhD, is presently Professor & Head of the Department of ELT at Gauhati
University, where she teaches and supervises Masters and PhD programmes in ELT. A Fulbright
Teaching and Research Fellow at the School of Leadership and Education Sciences, University of
San Diego, California (2019–2020), Dr Boruah has over 20 years of experience in English lan-
guage teaching and teacher education. Her interests and publications centre around ELT pedagogy,
materials development and teacher research.
Ajit Mohanty is a former Professor and ICSSR National Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
Fulbright Visiting Professor (Columbia University), Fulbright Senior Scholar (University of
Wisconsin), Killam Scholar (University of Alberta) and Visiting Professor in Western University,
Canada. His publications include The Multilingual Reality: Living with Languages (2019,
Multilingual Matters, UK). A Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science (USA) and a
Fellow and Past-President of the National Academy of Psychology (India), Mohanty has devel-
oped Multilingual Education Policies for Nepal and Odisha (India).